Civic Education in the Digital Age

by Margaret Rundle

How, where, and what did you learn about civic life?

This was the opening question of a workshop titled Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age conducted at the Fall 2014 Project Zero Conference in San Francisco. The lively discussion that followed surfaced themes related to participants’ civic education: teacher-led lessons and in person conversations, whether at school, with family, or with religious groups, on the topics of facts about the government and voting were most common. After documenting these themes, attendees discussed the following questions:

1. Do you think your education prepared you to engage civically in today’s digital world?
2. What about the civic education received by students today?

A resounding NO was the consensus.

The workshop members then viewed examples of contemporary youth civic engagement, ranging from the Change.org petition calling for President Obama to address gun violence, to the Twitter hashtag campaign #Bringbackourgirls raising awareness of the Nigerian school girls who were kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram, to the Harry Potter Alliance call to action Odds in our Favor addressing economic inequality. Attendees brainstormed the features of the opportunities afforded by digital media for civic action: these actions are youth-led, and can involve anyone, anytime, anywhere, on any issue, in a multitude of ways.

The stark contrast between the civic education themes and digital civic opportunities illuminates the challenges facing educators who work with young people and support their civic development.

The workshop described above was a joint effort between our Good Participation (GP) Team at Project Zero and the Educating for Democracy in a Digital Age (EDDA) Team at Mills College. Both teams are part of the Educating for Participatory Politics (EPP) initiative, which explores how digital media are transforming civic and political life and the implications for educators preparing youth for democratic life. As part of the EPP initiative, the Good Participation team has collaborated with Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), an international educational and professional development organization, on developing curricular materials designed to support youth to develop the knowledge, skills, motivation, and reflective disposition to participate positively in civic life today. We created activities and lessons with a digital orientation that complement FHAO resources centered on the Holocaust and Human Behavior.

In pilot work with these materials, students reflected on their current digital footprint and how they are presenting themselves online. Furthermore, they used online discussion boards to share their ideas on how digital media is being used currently in local, national, and global events (such as in Baltimore and in the Middle East), and they imagined how digital media might have been used in the past (for example, how might social media have been used by different factions in WWII?). Students also planned how to take action on an issue they cared about, leveraging the opportunities afforded by new media. For instance, one group of students decided to tackle the lack of trauma centers in their city neighborhood.

The Good Participation and FHAO teams are planning workshops to introduce these resources to educators. We will be conducting our first mini-course at the Project Zero Classroom summer institute in July 2015. If you are interested in learning more about these resources and upcoming workshops and mini-courses, stay tuned for updates on the Good Project website, Facing History and Ourselves website, and the Educating for Participatory Politics website.

Good Participation: Exploring Civic Engagement in the Digital Age

by Carrie James

When the militant group, Boko Haram, abducted hundreds of Nigerian school girls last month, the major news outlets began to report the story. Yet worldwide awareness of the crisis didn’t reach a tipping point until the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls began to circulate across Twitter and Facebook. As of May 13, the hashtag was used 3.3 million times on Twitter alone. While some skeptics question whether “hashtag activism” can lead to real world impact, the potential of social media to shine a spotlight on an urgent issue seems clear.

The growing use of social media sites to call attention to political crises and broader social issues is a current area of research for the Good Project. Our research team is part of the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) research network, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners who are exploring how digital life affords new modes of participation with civic and political issues.

The YPP network has identified five core “participatory practices” which, while not new in and of themselves, are facilitated in new ways by the digital technologies, social media, and other aspects of the internet. These practices include:

– investigation: researching social issues in order to become more informed
– production: producing content that contains a civic or political message
– circulation: sharing civically- or politically-oriented content created by others
– dialogue and feedback: engaging in discussion of social issues and giving feedback to powerholders
– mobilization: inciting others to take action on behalf of a cause

As part of the YPP network, our Good Participation research team has been conducting qualitative interview studies with civically active youth focused on how they engage these practices online. For instance, we’ve spoken with youth who produce videos or blog posts in which they seek to inform others about issues such as child sex trafficking. We’ve looked at how youth leverage sites like Change.org to mobilize people to sign petitions. We’ve explored how civic youth use Facebook to circulate words or images that signal their beliefs about issues such as gun control, environmental issues, or marriage equality. We’ve found that civically engaged youth are excited by the potentials of digital media for action in the world. Yet, we also find that expressing the civic voice in the digital space – especially given its public, networked nature – can pose challenges and dilemmas, including unintended audiences, uncivil dialogue, and even backlash.

Our work on these issues is being shared in different forms. Researcher Emily Weinstein published an article in the International Journal of Communication about how civic youth manage dilemmas of voice online. Margaret Rundle is the lead author of a forthcoming paper about different approaches youth take to digital civics. In my forthcoming book, Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap, I point to broader moral and ethical dilemmas in digital life that are relevant to civic uses of the web as well.

Finally, in an educational initiative called Educating for Participatory Politics, our team is working with Facing History and Ourselves to develop classroom materials that address both the opportunities and challenges for civic participation posed by digital life. We look forward to sharing these materials with our educator community in the near future.

If you are excited to learn more, consider joining us at Project Zero’s San Francisco conference, October 10-12, 2014. The implications of growing up in the digital age for civic education will be a featured theme.